AUSTRALIANS AT WAR

THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY is a compelling factual history of neoconservatism and its influence on US Foreign Policy in the Middle East during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Click on image above for details.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Has anyone stopped to think about what Israel’s ultimate intentions are for the Gaza Strip?

The Israeli settlers left it, or rather were removed reluctantly from it, in September 2005 when Ariel Sharon decided that the cost to Israel of maintaining the settlers in the Gaza Strip was far too high. In January 2006 Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections but the West decided that democracy had come up with the wrong answer so did not recognise their win and failed to support the new government preferring instead to support the corrupt Fatah faction in the Gaza which tried to wrest full control of the Gaza from the elected Hamas. They failed and, after a short battle for control, the Fatah faction leaders were kicked out. Hamas has remained in control of the Gaza ever since much to the chagrin of the Israelis who have laid siege to the Strip.

In response to the slowly strangulating siege and the ghettoising of Gaza, Hamas have kept up a mainly harmless barrage of rockets and mortar fire against Israel in an effort to get them to release their grip on the siege. In response Israel has let loose with helicopter gunships and attack aircraft against infrastructure targets that effect the entire population of the Strip as well as launching assassination attacks against Hamas leaders and operatives and other Palestinian fighters resisting the siege.

For nearly three years now the Gazan people have had to endure a steadily worsening siege that has deprived them of the very basics of living including health, fuel and food.

Yet, after all this, we have not seen in the West any comment about what the Israeli endgame is.

Let me enlighten you.

Their endgame is not getting Hamas to stop uselessly firing rockets into southern Israel. Nor is it to rid the Gaza of Hamas so that the Fatah faction can take control. To the extreme right-wing Zionists that are likely to become the next government of Israel after the elections next February, Fatah are as big an enemy as Hamas.

No mistakes should be made about what the Israelis want: They ultimately want nothing less than the entire Gaza Strip emptied of all Palestinians who will be transferred to the Sinai in Egypt, or Jordan, or the West Bank, or Lebanon. The Gaza will then be again occupied, this time solely and permanently, by Israeli settlers who will then annex the Gaza into Israel. That is the Israeli endgame. There is no other endgame with regard to the Gaza.

For months now there has been a propaganda build up toward a full-scale invasion of the Gaza by Israel. Over the past two years the Israelis have been manipulating and massaging the rhetoric about the Gaza to suit their own timetable. In the lead-up to the US presidential elections Israel held back on action to see how the political landscape would shape itself after the presidential elections. At the same time internal Israeli politics also kept major decisions on the back burner. However, now that President-elect Obama has revealed himself to be a strong supporter of Israel and the forthcoming elections in February in Israel are expected to produce a right-wing Zionist government that has no interest in a Palestinian sovereign state, the plans to move against the Gaza has been put back on the front burner.

Plans to make war against Hamas will be accompanied by the possibility of a simultaneous assault against Hezbollah and possibly even Syria. And, if that is the case, there must also be plans afoot to attack Iran.

A Middle East with President Obama in the US and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel can look forward to bleak 2009 while the peoples of the rest of the world struggles to fight off the ravages of the next Great Depression. Happy New Year?

Sunday, December 21, 2008

It is becoming clear that the rapidly deteriorating relationship between Pakistan and India has been carefully engineered by the US who plan to use the possibility of confrontation between the two nations as an excuse to ‘intervene’ in order to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

The plan has immense consequences on the geo-political landscape throughout the entire region. Just by taking Pakistan’s nuclear capability out of the equation, India will become the closest ally of the US in the region – it will also become the most powerful Western allied nation in the region and right next to China to its north. The new geo-political reality will also give the US a completely free hand to attack Islamic forces in north-west Pakistan and, indeed, anywhere else in Pakistan if the situation deteriorates to the point where there is a massive Pakistani revolt against US intervention in their country. They too will no doubt be targeted as ‘terrorists’.

The problem for the US now is that they simply don’t have the wherewithal to actually take control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. They have no treasure left with which to launch a full scale invasion against a country of some 173 million people, the vast majority of whom would not tolerate an American occupation, and nor do they have the manpower. The only alternative is for the US to attempt to get a compliant Pakistani government and its military to acquiesce to US demands that it hands over its arsenal for ‘safe keeping’, or lose it by having it destroyed by US missiles. Either way, there are likely to 173 million very angry Pakistanis for the government to contend with not to mention the possibility of several thousands of new recruits willing to fight with the Taliban against the US and their allies.

Once again the world is being pushed to the brink in order satisfy the warmongering lunatics of the Bush administration. How many more people have to die before this lunacy is stopped by the rest of the peoples of the world?The world must say ‘No!’ to ‘intervention’ in Pakistan – and say it now before it’s too late.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Hezbollah, a Shia organisation based in Lebanon, organised a massive demonstration in Beirut yesterday in support of Hamas, a Palestinian Sunni organisation, and the people of the Gaza Strip who have been imprisoned in the enclave ever since Hamas regained control of the government from the corrupt Fatah organisation who had seized control after the election of Hamas in January 2006.

“It's of course true that Hamas--an arm of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood--is at odds ideologically with Shia Iran, and that Shia and Sunni seem inclined to dislike, even slaughter, each other elsewhere in the Middle East.”

In fact, it’s not true at all; Hamas receives support from Iran and, as has been recently demonstrated on the streets of Beirut, receives support from Hezbollah which also receives support from Iran. And, of course, Syria, whose population is about two-thirds Sunni, also has very close ties with Hezbollah (Shia) and is also supported by Iran (Shia). About the only place where thee has been any serious conflict between Sunni and Shia is in Iraq – and that’s for local political reasons only that have nothing to do with any religious differences between the two sects.

The old colonial ploy of ‘divide and rule’ by stirring up trouble between various political or religious/tribal groups has failed as far as the Zionists and their propagandists are concerned to the point where it has now actually back-fired them. Instead of succeeding in wedging the two Muslim sects, they’ve actually succeeded in uniting them.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

The neocons are asking President Bush to commit one final act of gung-ho war before leaving office – to ‘liberate’ Zimbabwe. In typical warmongering style the neocons want the US to invade Zimbabwe to “secure a positive and lasting legacy in a country that has suffered under the boot of a megalomaniacal thug for decades”.

Never mind that the people are suffering; the neocons want Bush to invade in order to ‘secure a positive and lasting legacy’! In other words, they want Bush to invade so that it’ll make him look good. Bush has been in power for eight years, about the same time that Zimbabwe has been drifting from bad to worse, and the neocons want Bush to now put together a plan to invade, invade, and then ‘liberate’ Zimbabwe and do all this before 20 January just so that it’ll make him look good.

Setting one megalomaniacal thug against another will achieve about the same result as it did in Iraq.

The people of Zimbabwe don’t need ‘liberating’; they only need to have their President and his minions removed – then they need massive aid to get their country back on its feet. Every single member nation of the UN should contribute toward the task of ridding Zimbabwe of its President and his minions – except the U.S. whose government should be excluded entirely from any part of the rebuilding of Zimbabwe. Individual American private volunteers, however, should be made welcome.

Such an action by the world would demonstrate to those who are suffering in it that it does care about its fellow humankind and that we’d like to help out purely for the sake of helping out and not because it makes us look good or because the nations that needs the world’s help has something by way of valuable resources that the world’s Big Business wants to exploit.

Zimbabwe needs help. The last thing it needs is Blackwater type thugs to ‘liberate’ them or to have one lot of corrupt political gangsters replaced by another lot as per Afghanistan.

And the world certainly doesn’t need the neocons to tell us who needs ‘liberating’ and who doesn’t.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Tzipi Livni, Israel’s Foreign Minister and leader of the Kadima Party, has told students at a Tel Aviv high school that, once a Palestinian state has been created, Israeli Arabs should leave Israel to go and live in the new Palestinian state.

Her expectation is that, after centuries of living in their homelands in what is now Israel, what few Palestinians still remain there will be expected to join those that were made refugees back in 1948 in what little there is left of the West Bank and the Gaza Ghetto.

These are also the policies of the extreme right-wing Zionist parties led by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party that are vying for government at the upcoming Israeli elections to be held next February. The only difference between the Kadima party and the Likud is that Likud, despite their current electioneering propaganda, will never allow a Palestinian state to exist but want to push the Israeli Arabs out from Israel anyway through fear of being overwhelmed demographically at some time in the future, while Kadima actually talk of creating some kind of Palestinian state out of what’s left of the West Bank and the Gaza.

The reality is that there will never be a Palestinian state if Likud has anything to do with it and there will never be a Palestinian state acceptable to Palestinians that does not involve right of return of the refugees to their homelands, much of which is in what is now Israel, and without a totally settler-free West Bank based on borders being at the 1967 Green Line. In other words, while the Israeli Zionists have any say in it, there will never be a Palestinian state.

Hardly an 'independent soverign state', is it? Palestinians are never likely to accept such demands and conditions, which, of course, Netanyahu is quite aware of.

The world should know that Israeli Zionists will NEVER accept ANY kind of Palestinian sovereign state and that the various Israeli political parties’ talk of ‘peace’ is just pure propaganda designed solely for the dumb and gullible masses and to extract every last dollar they can from the US government.

McCain and Lieberman both know very well that the Pakistan government is no position to do any such thing since to do so would be an admission that their own intelligence service, the ISI, was complicit in the Mumbai attacks.

Both India and Pakistan are nuclear armed nations and McCain’s barely veiled indirect prodding of India to attack is extremely dangerous. His actions are clearly designed to provoke Pakistan to the point that the US will need to intervene immediately after any Indian strike against Pakistan to prevent a Pakistani retaliation. The ultimate object of the exercise is for such a US intervention to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons which warhawks and neocons in the Bush administration have for years feared will fall into the hands of a radical Islamic Pakistani government at some time in the future if America’s puppet Musharraf were to lose power. Musharraf has now gone and the current government is far from stable. The threat of war between Pakistan and India over the Mumbai attacks could well be the catalyst the US need for intervention in Pakistan but they are treading a dangerous path in a place where escalation could explode long before any so-called ‘intervention’ can get off the ground.

Clearly, the entire scenario of the attack on Mumbai and the resultant tensions between India and Pakistan have been deliberately orchestrated by the US and other allies in order to preclude any of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of anti-American Islamic forces or a future radical Pakistan government.

Much of Bush’s push for war in the run up to the invasion of Iraq was based on evidence that was provided by Iraqi defector Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, who in 1991, just after the end of the first Gulf War, was a senior general in the Iraqi army and in charge of all of Iraq’s WMDs. In 1995 when Hussein Kamel defected, he told his IAEA de-briefers in great detail all about the weapons that Saddam had and all about his plans to extend his WMD stockpiles prior to the Gulf War of 1991 and it was this information that Bush and the administration used directly to talk-up Saddam’s ‘threat to the world’ and his stockpile of WMDs prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. What Bush and the administration neglected to mention when directly quoting the defectors list of Saddam’s WMDs was that Hussein Kamel had also told his de-briefers that he himself had personally gave the order and supervised the destruction of those same weapons just after the first Gulf War in 1991. Bush could not possibly have quoted the defector without also knowing that this same defector had also told of the destruction of those weapons. And if Bush didn’t know it was because those who were in a position to know failed to tell him because they knew that it was not what Bush would have wanted to hear.

Bush and his minions continue to lie and are determined to perpetuate the myth of Saddam’s WMDs as the casus belli for a war they knew was illegal and morally wrong but were determined to have nonetheless. Once the Bush Presidency is over their must be an inquiry into his role in the war and if crimes are found to have been committed then Bush and his accomplices, including Britain’s Tony Blair and Australia’s John Howard, should be made to face charges in the appropriate international court.

According to a Ha’aretz report Hamas, who govern the besieged Gaza Strip, are preventing Gazans from making their pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia to attend Haj at Mecca.

This is a deliberate propaganda ploy that amounts to deceit bordering on lies.

The reality is this: Palestinian Authority (PA) President, Mahmoud Abbas, has used the Haj to gain a political advantage and demonise Hamas by taking advantage of his alliance with Israel and the US to get Saudi Arabia to accept only visas issued by the Abbas governed PA. Saudi Arabia will not accept visas issued by Hamas to Palestinians wanting to make Haj from Gaza. Hamas in not allowing its authority in the Gaza to be subverted by Abbas and what remains of his corrupt Fatah faction in the Gaza and has refused to allow some 3000 Gazans that have managed to obtain PA visas to leave unless a further 3000 Gazans who applied for visas through Hamas are also given visas by the Saudi government.

The ploy by Abbas and Fatah is a deliberately contrived attempt by Israel to yet again divide the interests of the Palestinian people generally and isolate further the Gazan Palestinians in particular.

Thursday, December 04, 2008

With only around ten weeks to go before the Israelis go to the polls in February 2009, Israeli settlers in the West Bank seem intent on provoking as much friction between themselves and Palestinians as possible. This provocation has been deliberately orchestrated by the Zionist settler movement in conjunction with the Likud and other right-wing pro-settler Zionist parties together with the connivance of the IDF who have shown overt reluctance to quell the settler violence against Palestinians and to evict the settlers from Hebron.

The reason for this deliberate provocation, and the subsequent publicity the settlers are getting, is to highlight to the rest of the Israeli population that there is still a powerful Zionist movement determined to make the West Bank a part of Greater Israel and to deny the Palestinian people any possibility of any form of sovereign state.

With Likud now running ahead in the polls, it seems that the settler violence has been designed specifically to make Zionist expansionism a major issue in the upcoming elections and for a post-election Netanyahu government. While there may yet be an, albeit reluctant, IDF crackdown on the violence, any crackdown will also be likely to attract sympathy for the settlers and the notion of a Greater Israel. This, coupled with the increasingly volatile situation in the Gaza Strip, all adds up to favour Israel’s right-wing.

A Netanyahu-led government will spell the end of all Palestinian hopes of a sovereign state and instead will usher in a program of greatly increased Palestinian persecution and oppression coupled with an invasion and evacuation of the Gaza Strip followed by its eventual reoccupation by Israeli settlers.

The violence by the settlers in the West Bank is but a prelude of things to come when Netanyahu becomes Israel’s next Prime Minister.

There is a gross misconception that is being pushed by right-wing Western extremists that Islamaphobia is not racism. Furthermore, among right-wing Zionists there is even a push to assert that to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semite.

Western right-wing extremists that are Islamaphobic argue simplistically that Islam is not a race and, therefore, it cannot be racist to be Islamaphobic. They ignore that discrimination against people because of their religion and/or culture is as much racist as discriminating against people because of their blood and biology.

Quite aside from the fact that Judaism embraces both a race and a religion, whereas Islam is strictly a religion, anti-Semitism is different than other forms of prejudice or racism. Whereas the racist view of blacks, for example, holds that they are "below" whites, anti-Semites think Jews are planning to rule the world. The Israel Lobby by American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt is just one example of this viewpoint.

Firstly, Mearsheimer and Walt quite emphatically do not suggest that “Jews are planning to rule the world” as Heni deceitfully infers. They merely suggest that the Israel Lobby, which includes non-Jews such as Christian Zionists and neoconservatives and other pro-Israel Zionists who are not Jewish, wield an extraordinary amount of influence over US foreign policy with regard to the Middle East generally and the affairs of Israel particularly.

Nor is it entirely true to say that “Judaism embraces both a race and a religion…” Not all practitioners of Judaism are actually ‘Jewish’ by race yet it is quite properly accepted that to discriminate against people that call themselves ‘Jewish’ by religion and culture because they or, more likely, their ancestors converted to Judaism for what ever reason, is racism.

Zionism, however, doesn’t fall into any ‘racism’ category. Zionism is a right-wing political ideology that embraces Israeli nationalism and a notion of a Greater Israel that precludes Arabs (which, in itself, is racist). The fact that many, but certainly not all, of Zionism’s adherents happen to be Jewish is in fact incidental. Zionism is not a ‘race’, nor is it a ‘religion’ and it is not a ‘culture’ – it’s an ideology.

Heni also becomes confused with regards to how anti-Semites view Jews. He argues on one hand that anti-Semites do not view Jews in the same way as, “for example”, white racists view blacks, which is as being, as Heni says, “below” whites, yet in the very next paragraph Heni writes:

Anti-Semitism was the motif for the Holocaust. Those unprecedented crimes combined religious Jew-hatred, quasi-scientific racial theories, and modern anti-Semitism in all its forms, including a comprehensive worldview.

Those “quasi-scientific racial theories” were based around the Nazi perception that many races that were non-Germanic or Aryan races, including, but not exclusively, Jews, were “untermenschen” (sub-human). Those perceptions of racism, not just anti-Semitism, were the blueprint upon which the Holocaust were perpetrated; indeed, it was what made anti-Semitism no different at all from other “forms of prejudice or racism” as Heni otherwise says.

Contrary to Heni’s view that the Holocaust somehow made anti-Semitism unique, Heni should be aware that had Hitler prevailed over the USSR, the number of European Jewry that perished would have paled against the slaughter that Hitler and Himmler had planned for the peoples of Russia and the Slavic nations. The point is that the Holocaust wasn’t just about European Jewry; it was about what the Nazis believed was the superiority of the Germanic and Nordic races relative to virtually all other races.

Despite Heni’s view that ‘anti-Semitism isn’t the same as Islamaphobia’, from the point of view that anti-Semitism and Islamaphobia are both resultants of discriminatory attitudes, they are exactly the same – they are both very much racist.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Barack Obama has made it abundantly clear that, instead of offering real change in US foreign policy and a realignment of US standing in the world, he will instead maintain the status quo of overt US militancy and superpower dominance as he pursues the same foreign policy objectives as George W. Bush and the neoconservatives.

In announcing his national security team, Obama told his audience that, while he believes “16 months is the right time frame” for the ‘withdrawal process’ from Iraq, he leaves the door open for continued occupation by adding “We will have to remain vigilant in making sure that any terrorist elements that remain in Iraq do not become strengthened as a consequence of our drawdown”.

By ‘terrorist elements’ Obama, just as Bush and his neocon supporters have done for the past five years, means anyone who dares rise up and challenge the US-approved and sponsored Iraqi government. Given the reality of the Iraqi geo-political landscape which guarantees that there will always be strife in Iraq while there is any semblance whatsoever of any US influence in Iraqi politics, then Americans can look forward to many more years of some level of occupation in Iraq and, therefore, many more lives of US soldiers being lost as a result.

And, of course, the bogeyman, Osama bin Laden, together with his al Qaeda organisation, will continue to be perpetuated by the President-elect as the Emmanuel Goldstein mythical enemy of the Western World. Obama tells us that “…we're going to have to mobilize our resources and focus [our] attention on defeating Al Qaeda, bin Laden, and any other extremist groups that intend to target American citizens”.

The arrogance of American exceptionalism seems also to have caught up with Obama as he tells the world: “We will strengthen our capacity to defeat our enemies and support our friends. We will renew old alliances and forge new and enduring partnerships. We will show the world once more that America is relentless in the defense of our people, steady in advancing our interests, and committed to the ideals that shine as a beacon to the world. Democracy and justice, opportunity and unyielding hope because American values are America's greatest export to the world.”

Significantly, Obama didn’t commit at all to a Palestinian state but, instead, talked of “…seeking a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians”, though didn’t elaborate on whose or what terms such a peace might come about.

At the end of his announcing of his national security team one is left wondering if anything has really changed at all despite the wishes of the American people – and the world. He did mention diplomacy one or twice but that was about the only difference between Bush’s policies and what seems to be Obama’s.

Monday, December 01, 2008

The first sentence in Blair’s piece this morning tends to sum up exactly what the extreme right-wing mainstream media propagandists are actually all about. He writes:‘Confronted by Islamic evil, blame-shy over-educated peaceniks are inclined to shelter behind complexity.’

First off, the use of the phrase ‘Islamic evil’ exposes the typical Blair/Bolt-style right-wing anti-Muslim Islamophobic racism while, secondly, the suggestion that the analysis of geo-political realities could actually cause people to stop and think about what is going on around them threatens the simplistic Blair/Bolt propaganda of the ‘they hate us for our values’ meme that appeals so effortlessly to the their dumb and gullible supporters who seem to hate ‘complexity’ as much as they do Muslims.

Blair reinforces the ‘let’s keep it simple’ approach with this: ‘But terrorism isn’t complex. It’s the simple work of murderous simpletons’. How wrong can he be?

‘Terrorism’ in the Blair/Bolt construct (I use the word ‘construct’ deliberately and provocatively here because it has an intellectual academic ring about it which really gets up the under-educated warmongers noses) is a one-sided affair that ignores entirely the terror that the West unleashes against the peoples of Islam whom they have been murdering for years in vast numbers.

Blair provides an example of ‘terrorism’ to demonstrate how ‘simplistic’ it is:

At 10 pm on Wednesday, an unsuspecting Thakur Budhabhai Waghela, 33, a sweeper employed at GT Hospital, was sitting down for his dinner when there was a knock on the door.When he opened the door, a stranger asked him for water to drink. After having the glass of water offered to him, the stranger shot Waghela dead at point-blank range in front of his six-year-old son, Yash.

The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab heard the first sounds of the fighter jets screeching through the sky above.It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night."The bombing started at 3am," she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. "We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one," she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. "I left them because they were dead," she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.

One wonders how ‘complex’ Blair’s explanation would be he attempted to justify this terrorist attack.

The Blair/Bolt simplistic propaganda technique is designed specifically for consumption by the dumb and gullible and their small minded warmongering flock of equally simplistic followers.

UPDATE

I tried to leave a post at Blair’s blog but Blair’s assistant, the child-like Tran, reckons I’ve been banned for some unknown reason. In stating that, Tran has decided to imitate a sheep by childishly using the letter ‘a’ multiple times. Naturally, like sheep, Blair’s Bloggies, totally incapable of any original thought of their own, let alone argument, have decided to do the same by abusing their right to post comments while I am unable to respond.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Whoever is responsible for the attacks in Mumbai, one thing is for certain; they were an extremely well armed, well equipped and highly organised group which puts them well outside of the usual rag-tag ‘terrorist’ groups that one would generally associate with these seemingly random attacks against civilian targets. The sophistication and their apparent coolness together with their well coordinated and simultaneous attacks against specific targets has all the hallmarks of a professional covert operation planned and coordinated in real time by persons other than those actually involved in carrying out the attacks.

The clear intention, as Fox News is already trying to do, is to blame the attacks on Pakistani extremists associated with ‘al Qaeda’ and the Taliban for the purpose of directly associating elements of the Pakistan intelligence services with ‘terrorism’ thereby, in turn, implying that some unknown Pakistani government personnel are supporters of extremists. Since Pakistan is a nuclear armed nation one can easily see where this is going.

Whether or not these attacks are designed to actually trigger an ‘intervention’ by the US and their allies against Pakistan or is simply part of a build up to ensure public opinion is on side for an ‘intervention’ at a later date is, as yet, unclear. What is clear, however, is that these attacks were not carried out by al Qaeda or the Taliban; they were far too sophisticated for that.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

In an interview with a Japanese television station Bush said that ‘Saddam was an enemy of the United States and a lot of people thought he had weapons of mass destruction’. What Bush neglected to mention was that a lot of people thought Saddam had WMDs only because they were deliberately lied to by Bush personally and many officers of his administration personally who told the people that Saddam had WMDs knowing full well that they had been destroyed in 1991.

When Bush says ‘a lot of people thought he had weapons of mass destruction’, he doesn’t include himself amongst them. Bush, Cheney, Powell and others in the administration were very much aware of the true status of Saddam’s ‘WMDs’ because Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, who had defected in August 1995, had told them that while Saddam Hussein had had WMDs, he no longer had any because Kamel, who at the time was a General in the Iraqi Army and in charge of Iraq’s weapons and their procurement, had ordered them to be destroyed.

Bush and his cohorts all knew this. Bush, Cheney, Powell and Stephen Hadley, who at the time was Deputy National Security Advisor and number two to Condoleeza Rice, all personally alluded in various documented utterings directly to Kamel’s debriefing in which he said that Saddam had had WMDs but they had since been destroyed. Bush, Cheney, Powell and Hadley all spoke of Kamel’s defection and Kamel’s statements about Saddam having WMDs but all neglected to add that Kamel had also said they had been destroyed.

There is no way that Bush or any of his cohorts can plead ignorance in this matter. All of them deliberately lied to world and the UN and knew long before invading Iraq that Iraq had no WMDs and, therefore, was any threat at all to any nation, least of all the US, the UK or Australia.

As a direct result of these lies an entire nation has been physically all but destroyed, hundreds of thousands if not over a million people have lost their lives, millions more have been driven from their homes, thousands of American and allied youth have perished directly in the war while thousands more have since succumbed to their wounds and mental scars.

Even as Bush prepares to turn his back on the shattered lives of millions he just can’t help himself – he is compelled to perpetuate the lie in the face of overwhelming evidence. The world should drag this criminal and his cohorts to the international courts where he should answer for his crimes against humanity. Waging unprovoked war against a sovereign nation is a war crime. Bush should be made to answer the charge.

Monday, November 24, 2008

A report in the Jerusalem Post reveals that the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will meet Elliot Abrams, arch neocon, facilitator of covert operations and some of history's most underhand dealings, prior to his meeting with Bush.

Friday, November 21, 2008

Israel and the US are making the most out of the latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), stretching the ‘Iran has a nuclear weapons program’ propaganda to its limits.

The latest report states that Iran has some 630kgs of ‘low–enriched’ uranium. The report itself does not suggest that there is anything sinister about this. Iran has made no secret of the fact that it wants to enrich uranium to level where it can be used to generate electrical power as it is entitled to do under international law.

The fact is Iran does not at all have enough weapons grade nuclear fuel to make a weapon. The NYT article is deliberately misleading and the ‘experts’ consulted to support the assertion are making statements that border on deceit. The only aspect of the story that borders anywhere near the truth is the concession that the ‘nuclear fuel’ needs ‘additional steps’ to be taken before they can ‘put it into a warhead design’ but this detail is written in such a way as to be lost in the emphasis of the headline and the inference that suggests Iran has a weapons program and is about to build a bomb. The simple stark reality that is lost in the propaganda is that there is still absolutely no evidence whatsoever to suggest Iran has a nuclear weapons program or that it is enriching uranium beyond that which it requires for electrical power generation.

Israel and the US are milking the report for all its propaganda worth in the hope of deceiving people in order to get public opinion to support a pre-emptive attack on Iran.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

An Israeli Air Force armourer, a junior commissioned officer with the 119th Squadron, communicating through a third person in the US on conditions of anonymity for obvious reasons, has told how ‘some laser guided ordnance’ was removed from the 25th Air Wing munitions storage facility at Ramon airbase. The ordnance was returned ‘a few days later’ and loaded straight on to two F16L aircraft of 119th Squadron by five men wearing special protective clothing and who were not regular armourers of the 119th Squadron but who had travelled with the returning munitions. The source said that he would normally supervise or help supervise the loading of armaments on to 119th Squadron aircraft. The aircraft then took off and returned ‘several hours’ later with their munitions spent. The source apparently was told that the aircraft had been on a ‘special exercise training mission’. The source went on to say that rumours on the base at that time were that the aircraft had attacked ‘targets in Syria’ but other similar rumours in the media didn’t surface until the following day. All, of course, was neither confirmed not denied by the Israeli authorities. The source says that this happened on the day that the Syrian nuclear facility was bombed, 6 September 2007.

The source has said that he has since left regular service with the IAF but remains a reservist. He has only decided to ‘talk’ since news of the uranium traces found at the Syrian facility emerged recently. He would not confirm that it was the 119th Squadron that bombed or was involved in the bombing of the Syrian facility.

The authenticity of the source cannot be checked; however, the story does seem to fit in with the circumstances and would seem feasible given Israel’s history of false flag operations. The source is not saying that the bombs were dosed with nuclear material but simply that they were clearly irregularly tampered with in unusual circumstances and at a time when the Syrian facility was destroyed.

Readers can make of it what ever they like.

UPDATE

It has been pointed out to me that 119 Squadron of the IAF operate F-16I aircraft and not F-16L's. The mistake is mine as I misread the original email. My apologies for any confusion.

So, according to Ya’alon, Iran is ahead of schedule by some five years. This is confusing because the last NIE, released in November of 2007, stated that Iran had actually halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The same report also stated that if Iran were to resume their program at that point then they might have a weapon by 2010-2015.

Jerome Corsi, writing in World net daily, told his readers that “Iran will have enough highly enriched uranium to make one or more simple gun-type atomic bombs by the end of this year”. That was in April 2006.

I could go on and on linking to stories that all make some claim about how far away Iran is from building a nuclear bomb. Neocons for years in their various magazines have been scaremongering about an imminent Iranian nuclear weapon ever since the US-sponsored Shah got the boot out of Iran way back in October 1979. The neocons were saying then that Iran was only a few years away from having a bomb.

The one thing all these articles have in common is a total lack of any evidence whatsoever that Iran even has a nuclear plant up and going yet, let alone a nuclear weapons program. Despite nearly thirty years of propaganda and rhetoric about Iran’s nuclear weapon program there has been not one tiny piece of evidence that even remotely suggests that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.

Now, if you were to ask me about Israel on the other hand…

Iran is not an existential threat to Israel; however, Israel, the only country in the Middle East that does have nuclear weapons, is an existential threat to Iran. It’s something that should be kept in mind next time one reads that Iran will have a bomb any day soon now. The reality is Israel has several hundred of them right now.

Monday, November 17, 2008

It’s become fairly obvious to most observers that the Israeli ploy as far as the Gaza is concerned has been to pressure and provoke the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to the point that their fighters react to the Israeli aerial and ground attacks and the ghettoising of the Strip. This will then provide an excuse for the Israelis to invade with the aim of ostensibly destroying Hamas, who the Israelis see as a ‘terrorist’ organisation, and ultimately driving all Palestinians from the Gaza on the basis that any Palestinians there will always be a security threat to Israel.

The Israeli propaganda and rhetoric places the blame for the suffering of the Gazan people on Hamas claiming that Israeli actions against the Gazan people is as a result of Hamas attacking Israel. The reality, however, is that Hamas is attacking Israel in an effort to stop Israel from attacking the Gaza in the first place and to get the Israelis to lift their blockade of the Gaza.

But the endgame for the Israelis is not just the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza; indeed, the invasion of the Gaza will only be a prelude to what Israelis see as the final confrontation with their arch-enemy, Iran. The Israeli hope is to coordinate their invasion of the Gaza Strip with an attack on Hezbollah which will be provoked by some action, real, or far more likely, imaginary or false flagged, that Hezbollah undertake against Israel. All-out war between Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah, so the Israelis hope, will then draw in Syria, then US, and then, hopefully, Iran who will be accused of supplying and arming Hezbollah in Lebanon.

As each stage of their march toward their final confrontation with Iran progresses the Israelis will, as always, present themselves as the victims; a role which has now become transparently obvious to the entire world. But, despite the transparency, Western governments will, as usual, acquiesce to Israeli demands that the rest of the world rush to protect Israel’s interest.

For years Israel has been playing a waiting game; a game whereby they simply bide their time waiting for all of the right circumstances to align in their favour and at that moment they will then strike. The George W. Bush administration with its massive neoconservative sub structure has provided the best opportunities yet for the Israelis to get their way in the Middle East but as yet the administration has failed to provide the Israelis the ultimate prize – the destruction of Iran as a competitive Middle East power that has so far prevented Israel from being able to vanquish their foes, Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria who are supported by Iran. There have been a few false starts, with the Second Lebanon War having been one of them, but time is now running out.

Despite now being a lame-duck president, Bush, one should be reminded, is still the Commander in Chief of US armed forces and he still has powers to wage war against anyone he sees as an enemy. Bush regards Iran as an enemy and Israel are keen to finalise their endgame with a final confrontation with Iran. The Gaza ploy may well be the springboard that Israel is looking for in order to realise that final confrontation.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

The ultra right-wing neoconservative Israeli Zionist, Daniel Pipes, famously wrote in 2005 an article which has become the standard cry of Zionist propagandists who attempt to argue that being anti-Islam is not being racist. His article, entitled ‘Anti-Muslim Racism?’, appeared in the 22 November 2005 edition of the ‘New York Sun’. Pipes simplistically argues that being anti-Muslim or anti-Islam is not racist because Islam is a religion and not a race.

For Pipes the notion of ‘racism’ is limited to the blood and biological differences of defined races of mankind and the negative interactions that can result from the perceptions of superiority that one group may develop over another. He rejects entirely the notion that racism may extend beyond blood and biology into what has become referred to as the ‘New Racism’ which is the racism of culture and religion.

Other extreme right-wing Zionists and their supporters argue that being anti-Zionist is racism. Indeed, one extremist Zionist activist, Judea Pearl, argues in an article titled ‘Anti-Zionism is Racism’ that to be ‘anti-Zionist’ is an “even worse form of racism than anti-Semitism”.

Inasmuch that Zionism is not a race by Pipes definition then Pearls argument is invalidated by Pipes’. Pearl’s argument is also invalidated even when one accepts the ‘New Racism’ of ‘religion and culture’ since Zionism, as well as not being a race, is hardly a religion and is actually a political construct rather than a cultural entity. Zionism, therefore, doesn’t fit within any definition of ‘racism’. It’s as much a political ideology as Nazism, Stalinism or any other political ‘ism’ and to claim that ‘anti-Zionism is racism’ while not accepting the concept of the ‘New Racism’ is pure deceit.

Pipes argument also falls by the wayside from the point of view that only a very small percentage of the worlds Jewry are actually racially Jewish. There have, of course, been for millennium varying degrees of anti-Semitism aimed specifically but often inappropriately at racial Jews; a racism that culminated in the Nazis attempted destruction of European Jewry. Zionists all over the world have ever since successfully managed to claim that the resulting Holocaust was an exclusively anti-Semitic event, a claim that disregards the hundreds of thousands of non-Jews that were also murdered in the Holocaust and the millions of Slavic, Polish and Russian peoples that perished during that horrific period, not to mention the fate Hitler had planned for the teeming millions of other Russians and Central Asians that also would have perished had Hitler prevailed entirely over the Soviet Union.

The reality is that most of the world now accepts that the racism of religion and culture is as much an evil as the racism of blood and biology. For the Zionists of this world, together with their supporters and propagandists, the rhetoric of ‘anti-Zionism is Racism’ and ‘anti-Islam is not’ is increasingly becoming seen as a label that displays an ignorance and arrogance that exposes the Zionist extremists and their supporters to be the real racists of the twenty-first century.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Further to my article of the 11 November 2008 when I hypothesised that the traces of enriched uranium reported on by the International Atomic Energy Agency at the so-called nuclear site that was bombed in Syria in September 2007 may have been mischievously placed there by the Israelis via the bombs they used, it seems that the Syrians are now thinking on the same lines.

Clearly, the Israeli raid on the Syrian ‘nuclear plant’, what with all its secrecy and lack of both denials and confirmation, has been some sort of well planned propaganda exercise designed to specifically accuse Syria of developing nuclear weapons with the aim of attempting to manipulate world public opinion against Syria so that future confrontations between Israel and their Arab neighbours will have the West already ‘on side’ if and when Israel provokes the final confrontation which it hopes ultimately will be the destruction of the Iranian government.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

The Western world should be quite clear about this; Benjamin Netanyahu will never ever allow a Palestinian state to exist in the West Bank, Gaza Strip or any where else that the Israeli right-wing Zionists considers to be part of an eventual Greater Israel.

The West should not be fooled by Netanyahu’s recent remarks about wanting to ‘seek an alternative to current peace talks’ if he becomes Prime Minister of Israel at their elections next February. Netanyahu is seeking only to play for time. He has absolutely no interest whatsoever in making peace with the Palestinian people and even less interest in allowing the Palestinians to have any kind of sovereign state of their own.

Instead, the Likud Party leader who could well be Israel’s next PM prefers to talk about subduing Palestinian fervour for a Palestinian state by offering what he calls ‘economic growth’. Nowhere in Netanyahu’s rhetoric is their any talk of Palestinian nationhood. Netanyahu wants to buy peace and security for Israel rather than allow the Palestinian people a sovereign peaceful independent state of their own. And even less likely under a Netanyahu regime in Israel will there any consideration given to a binational single state which Jews and Arabs can share as equals despite the fact that ultimately the one-state solution can be the only solution.

Netanyahu has an agenda that serves only the Zionist cause. He, together with his neoconservative supporters both within the Republican and Democrat ranks of US politics, seek only a final confrontation with their enemies Hezbollah, Fatah, Hamas, Syria and Iran in order to create their long-held dream of a Greater Israel at the expense of the Palestinian, south Lebanese and Syrian peoples.

The future President of the United States must not be conned by Netanyahu’s web of deceit and lies designed to detract the incoming President into giving away the last and no matter how remote opportunity to at least continue to talk of peace and Palestinian statehood. Once Obama accedes to Netanyahu’s ploy designed to stop any further talks of peace and statehood there will be little or no chance of ever turning back.

It is essential that concerned people write straightaway to President-elect Obama’s website demanding that, no matter what Netanyahu says, the talks on peace and nationhood for Palestinians not under any circumstances be halted.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The Israeli government is considering sending IDF terrorist forces in to the Gaza to forcibly remove Gazan villagers from villages where rockets have been launched against Israel and then entirely destroy the village with heavy artillery fire. The proposal was made jointly by Israeli Injustice Minister Daniel Friedmann and the prime minister's deputy Haim Ramon.

Already as a result of the rocket launchings against Israel, the vast majority of which seem to be ineffective, Israel Minister for Terrorism, Ehud Barak, has had the border crossings into the Gaza closed which has stopped essential fuel to flow in to the Gaza leading to major blackouts including power supplies for essential medical equipment at Gazan hospitals. Recently, Barak had the temerity to announce that right-wing Israeli extremists are ‘cancerous growths’. A bit much coming from a man who has been staunchly right-wing himself all his life and never had any qualms about involving himself in terrorist activities including dressing himself up as a woman in order to commit murder in a foreign country. Despite the Israeli Labor Party, which Barak heads, being considered ‘left of centre’, one should make no mistake about its political position regarding Palestine and the Palestinian people; it is as much a right-wing Zionist party as any other in Israel. The Israeli Labor Party is only ‘left of centre’ relative to other Israeli political parties, most of which are ultra extreme right-wing.

The ‘Jerusalem Post’ is reporting that traces of enriched uranium has been found by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at the site Israelis bombed in Syria back in September 2007.

The problem with this story is that by claiming traces of enriched uranium have been found at the site infers that the site wasn’t new and that the Syrians, far from just beginning to build a clandestine nuclear facility, were actually well advanced having either enriched uranium themselves, (though the report does not reveal to what extent the uranium discovered had been enriched or if the Syrians had enriched it), or being in a position where enriched uranium could be accepted into the facility for some purpose. Either way, the presence of enriched uranium can only suggest the Syrians were well advanced in some nuclear project or another and, if that was the case, it is very difficult to believe that the Israelis and the US did not know about it, and do something about it, much earlier.

The Israelis have been very cagey about the whole episode from the beginning neither confirming nor denying that they had even bombed the facility. Now, it seems, we may have a reason for why they have been so cagey.

The reality is that, if Israel had admitted that it was responsible for the raid, Israel would then open itself up to claims by the Syrians themselves to the very assertion that I am making now that Israel could have used traces of enriched uranium (which the world knows the Israelis do have) on the weapons they used to bomb the facility so that they may be found sometime later by the IAEA to confirm the rumours started by Israel and the US that it was indeed a nuclear facility, in turn sparking a ‘see, we told you so’ moment and a propaganda victory for Israel and the US.

It’s now clear that the destruction of the facility was not the essential outcome of the raid but, rather, the raid provided an opportunity to ‘plant’ enriched uranium at the site in order to further demonise Syria and to put Western public opinion on side for any future action Israel may take against Syria or, more likely, its allies, Hezbollah in Lebanon.The window of opportunity for Israel to kick start the Final Confrontation with Iran via another war with Hezbollah and Hamas is still open. Bush is still President, he is still Commander in Chief and still has the powers Congress gave him to wage war without prior Congressional approval.

Sunday, November 09, 2008

The UK ‘Daily Telegraph’ reports that a paper written by the UK Ministry of Defence, MI5 and Special Branch shows that there are some 200 terrorists networks in the UK and that they are ‘planning mass casualty strikes in Britain’. Fearmongering reports like this have been emanating from the UK (and the US) ever since 9/11. Rarely, however, do any of the ‘threats’ become realised and they are either simply forgotten or used as further propaganda by the authorities who then go on to claim that that particular threat has been thwarted because of the anti-terrorism laws that are in place which, in turn, justifies the laws that have been used to clamp down on Muslim dissidents who the authorities claim are ‘al Qaeda’ terrorists.

Such fearmongering from the British security services serves two purposes but the primary purpose is not so much as to warn the British people of an imminent ‘terrorist’ attack but to promote racial intolerance among the British people. The kind of racism they wish promote these days is not so much the racism of blood and colour; Britain has a long history of that kind of racism already, but the new racism of culture and religion that now pervades throughout the UK since 9/11 and particularly since 7/7.

The ‘al Qaeda’ label is used by the British authorities as part of the Western allies continued global propaganda effort to perpetuate the myth of an international terrorist organisation led by the long-dead Osama bin Laden so that the so-called ‘Global War on Terror’ can continue unabated.

For the British establishment, the ‘al Qaeda in Britain’ propaganda myth serves two purposes: First, it caters for the need to keep the British people in a state of perpetual fear so that the expense of a ‘Global War on Terrorism’ can be justified and, secondly, it serves the interests of Britains traditional right-wing racists who continue to fear that their so-called traditional way of life will be tainted, not just by the influx of peoples with different ‘blood and colour’ as had occurred decades earlier, but also by peoples who have a different ‘culture and religion’. Furthermore, in order to meet their needs, the traditional racist white Britons that form the old British establishment use the old colonial divide and rule technique of employing one segment of a population, in this case those that are of a different ‘blood and colour’ and who have now been in the UK for some time, to help support their other agenda of demonising those that have a different culture and religion. The old racism of ‘blood and colour’ is not one that the average British white racist can now do anything about. But the new racism of culture and religion, to them, is now seen as even more of a threat to their ‘way of life’ to the point where the propaganda of fear and hatred serves to cover their paranoid racist fears.

Friday, November 07, 2008

The trouncing the right-wing of America has received as a result of the Obama win has upset the extreme right-wing bloggers of Australia and their overseas supporters, particularly that tiny band of loonies that gather to roost at Tim Blair’s blog. Blair’s blog at Australia’s version of Murdoch’s UK ‘Sun’ newspaper, the ‘Sydney Daily Telegraph’, where the crudest of tabloid journalism meets with the requirements of Australia’s right-wing racists and warmongers, is the home of the most extreme of Australia’s lunatic right-wing fringe.

‘Mr Rudd said it was a matter for the Liberal Party to explain former Prime Minister John Howard’s comment last year that terrorists would be hoping for an Obama win in the presidential election.“It is a matter for the Liberals to explain to the Australian people and to make proper account to the Australian people,” he said.’

Blair then says: “What a very odd thing for Rudd to say. Wasn’t he the fellow who vowed after his own election win to “put aside the old battles of the past”? Now he’s pursuing a retired politician over remarks made more than 12 months ago – in a bid to swing attention away from small man sniping at the current President.”

Retired politician?! This is Blair’s fantasy. It is his way of avoiding the ‘twoof’ that he detests so much. To say that Howard ‘retired’ is a blatant lie, the sort of lie that one comes to expect from Blair and his bloggies. The reality is; both John Howard and his government were resoundingly booted out of office. And now it is the American neocon’s turn to get the shove as well. Naturally, I wrote to Blair to remind him of this but, of course, the ‘twoof’ is not something that the deceitful liar and manipulator Blair would want to publish on his blog. Other comments that also alluded to this were also either censored entirely or heavily edited by Blairs gormlessly inane assistant, Tran, who’s looking after shop while Blair’s in the US to witness the demise of his heroes.

Blair’s bloggies are now trying to console themselves by telling each other that they can have a good laugh at the so-called ‘left wing governments’ efforts to put right all the wrongs that the likes of Howard and Bush have created in this world. One of them, a MarkL of Canberra, froths and foams at the mouth for a full 1500 word rant about the left in an effort to revitalise the shattered morale of the extreme right-wing. All MarkL actually achieves is demonstrating how utterly flawed the policies of the last eight years have been and how disastrous they’ve been for the world generally.

Blair is only successful with his blog at the Sydney Daily Telegraph because, one, Murdoch employs him (without Murdoch he his nothing), and, two, he has his tiny but vocal coterie of mindless supporters to justify his existence.

I doubt they’ll actually get over their loss. Thankfully, the rest of the world will.

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Israel has for some time claimed that Iran is an ‘existential threat’ to Israel. The reality, however, is that Israel is actually an existential threat to Iran – and in being so, is also a threat to world peace.

Israel’s claim of Iran being an existential threat stems from the deliberately misinterpreted words of Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who on 26 October 2005 gave a speech to a conference in Tehran in which he said that the Zionist Israeli government should be wiped from the ‘pages of time’. The right-wing Zionist-supporting neoconservative-controlled organisation known as the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) who were responsible for the deliberate misinterpretation spun Ahmadinejad’s words to read ‘wipe Israel off the map’. MEMRI were successfully able to push their interpretation to the western media who then picked it up and ran with it throughout most of the mainstream media. Since then the quote, or rather misquote, has been at the core of the US and Israel’s propaganda against Iran. The US and Israel have been able to utilise the misquote together with Iran’s quest to produce nuclear energy for electricity generation in a relentless propaganda bid to demonise Iran by claiming that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program that will enable Iran to build a bomb with which to carry out what Israel claims is Iran’s threat to physically destroy Israel.

All this propaganda of course, is just that; propaganda. Israel and their neoconservative allies in the US have been harping on about Iran’s so-called nuclear weapons ambitions for years, long before Ahmadinejad came on the scene. When one objectively examines the geo-political reality, however, a completely opposite picture to the one the Israelis and the US paint emerges. Rather than Iran being an existential threat to Israel, it is Israel that is the existential threat to Iran.

Iran, even Israel and the US concede, doesn’t actually have any nuclear weapons. At this moment of time it doesn’t even have a nuclear power plant let alone weapons. Israel and the US do. Indeed, Israel is so heavily nuclear armed that its arsenal alone could completely and utterly destroy all of Iran – and most of the Middle East with it. Furthermore, despite the propaganda, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of Iran having any nuclear weapons program. Not a skerrick. Yet time and time again the US and Israel claim the Iranians are edging closer and closer to having a bomb. But not once have either country produced any evidence to back up their claims.

So what are the Israelis and the US really after with regards to Iran? The answer is the same as it was with Iraq and for the same reasons – regime change in order to cut off support for the Palestinians and the Lebanese of south Lebanon, or, to be more precise, Hamas in the Gaza and the West Bank and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Only these two organisations, and to a lesser extent, Fatah, stand in the way of Israel’s dreams of a Greater Israel that includes the Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon up to the Litani river. Iranian support of Syria is also very much a feature of Israel’s push against Iran.

In all likelihood, by next week Barack Obama will be the President-elect of the United States. However, until he actually becomes President on 20 January 2009, George W. Bush will remain the Commander-in-Chief of Americas armed forces and President of the US still with his wartime powers. With total disregard to the results of the elections, Bush still wields ultimate power. And even with a successful transference of Presidency on the 20 January next year, the world still cannot relax on the likelihood of an inferno engulfing the Middle East. Israel goes to the polls the following month and if Netanyahu wins government, the existential threat toward Iran from Israel will still remain. The world should not have any illusions about a change of government in the US lessening the threat of attack against Iran and the subsequent turmoil such an attack will have on the Middle East. While the Zionists of Israel and their supporters in the US still maintain their dreams of a Greater Israel, the existential threat to Iran will remain.

As usual, US propaganda has attempted to justify the attacks that have killed children and innocent civilians by saying they were targeting ‘al Qaeda’ both in Pakistan and Syria. In the latest attacks by US terrorists in Syria, eight innocent civilians were reported to have been killed and Syria has said that future incursions into their country by US terrorists will result in retaliation. The US government have not produced any evidence to support their claims that they were after ‘foreign fighters’ entering Iraq from Syria. Clearly the irony of such remarks regarding ‘foreign fighters in Iraq’ has been missed as it seems the only foreign fighters that are in Iraq are the US terrorists themselves.

For some time the US government has been in the habit of referring to fighters that attempt to defend themselves and their respective countries against US terrorism as ‘al Qaeda’ after the organisation of the same name that the American CIA organisation set up in the last century to combat a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and led by the late Osama bin Laden. The US had also accused bin Laden of being responsible for the attacks against the American people on 9/11, an act of terror that much of the world now know was actually perpetrated with the connivance of extremist elements within the US government itself.

While the latest US terrorist acts have been nowhere near as deadly as the initial attacks US terrorists made on the Afghani and Iraqi people in 2001 and 2003 respectively in which well over a million people died and millions more driven from their homes and country, the latest attacks indicate that they are still willing to kill innocent people in order to perpetuate the myth in the West that those that fight to defend their lands against US terrorism are some kind of evil enemy that must be eliminated in order to maintain the equally mythical perception of ‘American exceptionalism’.

The word ‘terrorist’ is bandied about in the West without any thought or consideration to the real meaning of the word. It is hoped that my use of the word in the context that I have used above will provide a new and different perspective about who the real ‘terrorists’ are in the world.

Monday, October 27, 2008

The world is hoping and even praying that nothing happens that will upset an Obama win in the upcoming US election. Yet today McCain is either indulging in some serious wishful thinking or he knows something that we don’t. According to some reports, he has told the world that, despite the polls telling us otherwise, he ‘guarantees a win in next week’s election’. He concedes that it’ll be close but, nonetheless, he thinks he’s going to get the job.

Reports are already coming in about voter fraud where there are computer voting systems in place for early voting. Even Fox News is reporting that most Americans are actually expecting widespread voter fraud to take place. With just over a week to go before the election – and remember; a week is a very long time in politics – the window of opportunity for the GOP and/or other ‘interested’ parties to avert an impending disaster for the Republicans is rapidly closing.

On the other side of the world in Israel, another election outcome that could equally determine the future of the Middle East is being observed with as much anticipation as the outcome of the US presidential elections.

But the most terrifying aspect of a McCain win in the US and a Netanyahu win in Israel is the very much enhanced likelihood of a final confrontation with Iran and the fallout, literally and metaphorically, that such a confrontation will have for the Middle East and the world. Netanyahu has in the past hinted at a ‘nuclear strike on Iran’. And, of course, who can forget McCain’s policy of ‘Bomb, bomb, bombing Iran’.

The American people, not just for themselves but for the entire world, must ensure that McCain doesn’t become President. And with an Obama victory the world should then demand peace for everyone in the Middle East.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

The US is now putting significant pressure on the Iraqi government to sign up for another three years of US occupation. They are threatening that “the consequences of not having a Sofa (Status of Forces Agreement) and of not having a renewed UN authorisation are pretty dramatic in terms of consequences for our actions”.

According to US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, ‘A failure to put an agreement in place could mean a loss of ground against al-Qaida and Iranian-backed militias and criminal elements in Iraq’.

The UN mandate which covers the current allied presence in Iraq expires on 31 December this year but US administration officials are anxious to tie up an agreement to extend their occupation for a further three years as soon as possible; presumably before the presidential election on 4 November. If the Iraqi government doesn’t agree to the ‘Sofa’ arrangements proposed then the US will need to seek an extension of the UN mandate. Given the current frosty climate between the US and Russia, a UN Security Council member that holds veto power over any UN mandates, a UN extension of a mandate isn’t necessarily a given just because the US want it.

Since there is no al ‘Qaeda in Iraq’, and a continued American presence in Iraq is more likely to encourage Iranian-backed militias rather than dissipate their influence, and considering that the majority of ‘criminal elements’ in Iraq are those that are finance by the US, it would seem that Iraq would be far better off it were to get rid of the US entirely from their country so that the Iraqi people can determine for themselves their own destiny which something they are going to have to do sooner or later anyway; if not now, then in three years time.

One has to wonder what Secretary of Defence Gates has in mind when he says “the consequences of not having a Sofa (Status of Forces Agreement) and of not having a renewed UN authorisation are pretty dramatic in terms of consequences for our actions”.

The attitude of the Taliban with regard to ‘al Qaeda’ is indicative of the extent of influence ‘al Qaeda’ as an organisation really has in Central Asia – about zilch.

Western propagandists would like us to think that ‘al Qaeda’ is an extensive, well-organised internationalist Jihad movement with branches every place where there are American and allied forces. The reality is that ‘al Qaeda’ exists these days largely as a figment of Western propagandist’s somewhat vivid imagination and the words ‘al Qaeda’ are basically used as a convenient catchall label to define to the Western public who the ‘enemy’ is as it relates to the equally overused and inappropriately titled ‘Global War on Terror’. In nearly all cases they are, in fact, simply fighters who are resisting US domination in their respective countries. Among these fighters are those who have come from other countries to help those they consider to be their ‘brothers’ defend their country despite the fact it is not their own country. It is this air of internationalism among young Muslims wanting to help other Muslims in the fight against oppression and persecution and this notion of pan Islamic camaraderie that has given rise to the myth of ‘al Qaeda’ being the overarching enemy. They have become the perpetual enemy. There is barely any discussion in the West about any of today’s trouble spots around the globe where ‘al Qaeda’ doesn’t get a mention.

Rather than try to explain to the Western public the intricate nuances of continually shifting alliances and allegiances of America’s enemies in every theatre of fighting, it is far easier for the US and their allies to simply lump all of these enemies under the one banner called ‘al Qaeda’. And in situations where the Western public know that a particular group is known not to be ‘al Qaeda’ then they are usually referred to simply as an ‘al Qaeda’ linked terrorist organisation or some such.

The fact is the Taliban are not ‘al Qaeda’ and Osama bin Laden is very likely long dead. However, their continued ‘existence’ is required by the US and their allies in order to perpetuate the myth of ‘al Qaeda’ being a terrorist organisation that remains a threat to the West. Once the myth of ‘al Qaeda’ is exposed the US and their allies will then have no ‘enemy’. They would then have to explain what all the wars have really been all about.

The war in Afghanistan has got to the stage now where the invaders have realised that they cannot possibly ever actually ‘win’ the war against the Taliban. They could keep it going forever and a day, but they can’t actually ‘win’ it. The time has come for the two sides to talk. The Taliban realise that the West wants concessions that will make them look as though they’ve achieved something and so the Taliban are happy to play along with the idea that they’ll disassociate themselves from ‘al Qaeda’ in order to achieve their goals in Afghanistan. It works for the Taliban who get to most likely at least play a major role again in the running of their country, and it works for the US and their allies who get to keep the myth of ‘al Qaeda’ going as part of their ongoing ‘Global War on Terror’ elsewhere in the world. It also leaves the options open to reuse the ‘al Qaeda in Afghanistan’ myth if the need arises in the future if things don’t pan out after any settlement there.

Sooner or later though, the world is going to learn that ‘al Qaeda’ was merely a late twentieth-century rag-tag group of disillusioned Jihadists whose numbers probably never exceeded a hundred or so in their heyday but whose continued mythical existence into the twenty-first century was fabricated for the purposes of enhancing US imperial hegemony and neoconservative dreams of Israeli Zionist expansionism and influence in the Middle East.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Fred Barnes, writing in the neocon comic ‘Weekly Standard’ about Sarah Palin’s future concludes his piece with these words: “Whether they know it or not, Republicans have a huge stake in Palin. If, after the election, they let her slip into political obscurity, they'll be making a tragic mistake.”

If, as the neocons would like, Palin is Vice-President after the election, then why would she slip in obscurity? Surely, if you’re giving your whole-hearted support to the McCain-Palin campaign you shouldn’t really be indulging in such defeatist talk, should you? Unless, of course, the outcome of the Presidential elections, even for the neocons, is already a foregone conclusion.

Perhaps ‘Defeatist Freddy’ should take a leaf out of fellow neocrazy ‘Weekly Standard’ writer, Stephen ‘Smokey’ Hayes, who seems to have been smoking something that’s caused him to once again drift off into ga-ga land. His piece is titled – wait for it – ‘McCain wins round three’!

Friday, October 17, 2008

The caption under the photo in this BBC article reads ‘The issue of civilian casualties is hugely controversial’.

What’s ‘controversial’ about it? What’s to discuss that makes it a 'controversy’? The Americans and their allies have invaded a country and their armed forces are killing the inhabitants of that country. It’s not ‘controversial’; it’s criminal. It should be fairly clear now to all in the West that the Afghan people are not in the slightest bit interested in having Western-style democracy, especially American-style democracy, rammed down their throats. For them it’s a farce. It’s an excuse for those like the US puppet Hamid Karzai and others that involve themselves in it to rip off their own people. They’re sick and tired of people invading them and they’re sick and tired of the corruption and hypocrisy that follows.

The Taliban and their allies are now determined to put an end to the farce. The Western allies in Afghanistan can never win. The best they can hope for is a negotiated peace followed by complete withdrawal. And, for the sake of both the innocent civilians of Afghanistan and the Western kidz that are sent there to kill them, the quicker the better.

The number two ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’ leader, known as Abu Qaswarah or Abu Sara, has, according to a US military statement that we are expected to believe, blown himself up by detonating his ‘suicide vest’ rather than allow himself to be captured.

We are told that ‘US forces were raiding a building where Abu Qaswarah was holed up on October 5 when a gunfight erupted. The militant leader, who suffered gunshot wounds, moved upstairs with his fighters and some women and children, and exploded his suicide vest,’ the report states.

Are we really expected to believe that these people go around 24 hours a day wearing their ‘suicide vests’ just in case they’re caught ‘holed up’ in a house with women and children with them? A far more likely explanation for the explosion that ended up killing the ‘al Qaeda in Iraq’ leader and presumably the women and children and others that were with him, is that the US military either threw or launched grenades into the building.

The imagery of an ‘al Qaeda in Iraq’ leader wearing his ‘suicide vest’ at all times ‘just in case’ he gets caught ‘holed up’ is just the sort of propaganda the dumb and gullible in the West are likely to lap up.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

It’s gone awfully quiet out there in neocon land. They’re not putting up much of a fight to help their man in to the White House to replace Bush. And what little fight they are putting up seems half-hearted and even defeatist, somehow accepting of what seems inevitable – an Obama win.

And where’s Dick Cheney? We haven’t heard anything from him. He always was one to keep a low profile publicly but now it’s almost as if he’s disappeared off the planet. He hasn’t actually dropped off the planet (unfortunately), but rather than being out their pushing McCain and his 'lets have more of the same' ideology, Cheney’s just doing a little bit of quiet campaigning and fundraising up in a Chicago suburb for GOP candidate Marty Ozinga. All very low profile.

So, what’s going on? After all the effort they went to in order to get power by cheating at the ballot box and defrauding the electorate, starting wars with lies and worse, whittling away the Constitution, depriving peoples of their rights, robbing the treasury, awarding themselves massive contracts, handing over massive amounts of taxpayers money to their mates in the banks so the banks can lend it back to the taxpayer, shove the world to the brink of another Great Depression, flex a few wasted and now ineffectual muscles in the general direction of their arch enemy Russia, squawk on pointlessly about a Palestinian state that they know is never going to happen and generally turned a comparatively peaceful and almost flourishing world into a brutish nightmare for millions, are they really just going to walk away?

As I said, it’s gone awfully quiet out there in neocon land. Far too quiet. They’re up to something. Do the neocon writers know something the rest of us don’t to the point where they feel they don’t need to put too much effort into getting their man up? Is this the right-wing lull before the storm of what may be their final thrust for power that will ensure that the ‘New American Century’ will indeed go the full distance?

If, as they say, a week is a long time in politics, then three weeks out from an election can seem like an eternity within which anything happen. Heave a sigh of relief if nothing happens, but don’t say you weren’t warned if it does. The likes of Cheney and his band of power-hungry warmongering lunatics rarely walk away from anything – especially after having come this far.

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Contrary to what the neocons would have us believe the success of the ‘surge’ in Iraq is a myth. The reason why some of the violence dropped off is not because US soldiers were able to eliminate the insurgents but because the US government were able to buy them off. And those they weren’t able to buy off they simply had killed by those that they were able to buy off.

In Iraq the ‘al Qaeda’ label is merely a catchall for anyone who fights against the US occupation there. The propaganda value of the ‘al Qaeda’ label is still very powerful when it comes to perpetuating the myth of the ‘surge’ particularly, and the ‘Global War on Terrorism’ generally.

In Afghanistan the situation is so different than in Iraq that a ‘surge’ is not possible and even the commander in chief in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, concedes this. The simple fact is; the Afghani fighters know from history that a concerted and tenacious defence of their homeland will always see the invader off eventually. Nor are they open to bribes. Those that were able to be bought off were bought off years ago and are either now in the Karzai puppet government or are warlords with their own domains scattered throughout Afghanistan. In other words, there is no one left to buy off.

Search This Blog

Followers

About Me

is an Aeronautical Engineer, Historian and general carer of what goes on in the world.
Apart from an earlier career in engineering, Lataan also has a First Class Honours BA degree in History and a PhD in International Politics.
All material on this site is available for use without permission but it would be appreciated if the source is acknowledged.